I have seen a lot of guides to configure headless operations without attached display, keyboard, and mouse - all of which seem to be out of date. Maybe it's because that Raspbian has evolved or something else. Anyways, this technote is based on Raspbian Stretch or Stretch-Lite circa September 2017.

I got this Raspberry Pi Zero "W" for USD 5.00 by walking into a local store (http://www.microcenter.com/product/486575/Zero_W) in the Dallas/Fort Worth Texas USA area. That price is for one. If you want more, then the unit price goes up - sort of a volume "anti-discount" . They also have a USD 5.00 price on the "official" Pi zero case. Unfortunately, you have to walk-in as I was told. There must be other stores around the 3rd rock that offer comparable discounts (UK? Hong Kong? Rotterdam?).

I'll assume that the reader has just created a MicroSD Raspbian installation in the usual manner on the workstation. Make sure no writes are pending. If the 2 Stretch partitions are not yet automounted, pull out the caddy and push it back in. This should cause an automount of the 2 Stretch partitions of the MicroSD.

On my Linux system, `sudo blkid` shows the following after creating the Raspbian boot MicroSD: